An Introduction to IPv6 352
Playboy writes "Here is a great introduction to IPv6 in general, the technological background, the reasons for the move and the effects this will have on networks. Understandable for network novices like me but still includes many details on the technological side of things."
yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:4, Insightful)
Take for example the following IPv6 address: 43FB:0000:0000:0000:0000:BB3F:A0A0:0000 This could be shortened to 43FB::BB3F:A0A0:0 instead. Now you might ask: "What's up with the double colon?" If you thought that, good for you. You've seen something many people would not have seen on their first try. The double colon (aka "::") signifies that we have removed a series of hexadecimal blocks from the address. These will always be contiguous zeros. AKA "0000:0000:0000:0000" can be shortened to just "::". Therefore when you see the double colon in an IPv6 address, it can be automatically assumed that they are all zeros.
Ahh yes, "simplifying IPv6 addresses". No, there is nothing simple about remembering those addresses (haven't there been studies that say 7-10 numbers in a row is about all we can remember?) So here we have 10+ numbers and letters that don't make much sense (yeah some people have gotten vanity IPv6 addresses like ABCD::BEEF::). Nothing is simplified there until you get the DNS up and running for it (not that this is hard or anything but it isn't exactly easy)
It is true that IPv6 is not human friendly; however, in the long run, it will help solve a lot of issues with the current shortage of available IPv4 addresses on the internet.
Yeah, the "shortages"... Just tell the people hoarding all the damn addresses to hand them over. Sorry but MIT, Apple, etc, as much as I respect their contributions to the human race, do not need a Class A. Allow for the redistribution of the IPs and we should be good to go for quite some time.
Be thankful people don't have unlimited IPs in their house. Most people that want to have multiple computers connected to the Internet use a NAT router and at least protect themselves SOMEWHAT from the outside threats. Can you imagine what would happen if all the Comcast retards were straight to the Net with their own IP on each computer?
ISPs make some good money (hell mine gets $5/mo more out of me for an additional IP) selling off static/dynamic IP space. You think Comcast is going to move for a switch when they make $10/mo per extra IP?
Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:5, Funny)
You're not dumber than a monkey are you?
Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:2, Funny)
Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:3, Funny)
The proper equation for describing the curve involves avocadoes, imaginary numbers, and a pet chinchilla in Memphis named "Earl".
Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares if its card to remember an IPv6 address? Do you really memorize multiple IPs from multiple subnets that often? I can personally only think of 2 subnets I have memorized right now, and I work as a system admin full time.
As for the shortages, you think that it's a good idea to have scarcity in the IP market just so people will be encouraged to run NAT? I think its presumptious of you to force conditions on me, personally I'd love to have IPs for each machine in my house, but I can't because IP addresses are hard to come by.
And your last point, yes, ISPs are scumbags, but it seems that the fact that they price gouge for IPs would make you for IPv6, not against it.
Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:3, Interesting)
Sysadmins and regular Slashdot readers are in the minority. Personally I'd rather have the Comcast weenies behind a single firewall... Then I wouldn't have to block entire
Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:3, Interesting)
As someone who wishes they weren't supporting Comcast, and is reasonably technically-oriented, what alternatives could anybody suggest?
-Jesse
Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:2)
Again, if Comcast customers are required to run NAT in order to have multiple machines online, and if I am a Comcast customer, then I am requried to run NAT due to other peoples' ignorance, and I don't like that.
Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:4, Insightful)
The internet is successful because there is little central control (aside from DNS). When you start trying to solve other people's problems by mandating network policy, you end up with the "smart network, dumb terminal" philosphy of the phone network.
The internet doesn't work when Joe can't connect to Jane because they're both behind NAT. By discouraging IPv6, and therefore forcing NAT upon large parts of the internet, you drastically limit the number of possible connections that users can make.
Just because browsing and email work fine behind NAT doesn't mean NAT isn't limiting other new applications of the internet. And just because you can't think of new applications doesn't mean that the millions of people trapped behind NAT can't.
In fact, people already have, and they get stuck behind NAT all the time. Game servers, P2P apps, etc.
Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason the internet is successful is that every user is a peer. One computer may be a server and the other a client, but the server could just as easily be the client and the client could just as easily be the server.
Unless, of course, the client is stuck behind NAT and can't be a server. Maybe he could ask his ISP or sysadmin for permission to recieve incoming connections on a specific port.
When you tel
Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:2, Insightful)
People are going to buy some sort of all-in-one switch to connect their home computers to the internet as well as to each other, and that device will undoubtedly have a
Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:5, Insightful)
And that device will undoubtedly have a defult password of admin.
Oh just think of the phone were going to have
Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:3, Interesting)
last time i checked, there were only 4 class A's left (stanford was the fifth, but they gave theirs up a few years ago i believe)... so thats ~70mil addresses to give back. i dont believe that would makes us "good to go for quite some time"
There is no shortage (Score:5, Informative)
Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:5, Insightful)
Not all that much different from today, for 2 reasons:
ISPs make some good money (hell mine gets $5/mo more out of me for an additional IP) selling off static/dynamic IP space. You think Comcast is going to move for a switch when they make $10/mo per extra IP?
If anything, they would take this chance to wage a renewed campaign of "you don't really need that router, please buy multiple IPv6 addresses".
Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll take that wager. It would be interesting to see the distribution of security experts to households with computers. Sure, some households may have folks that know enough to go to windowsupdate every couple of weeks, but I'll bet you that qualified security professionals are quite scarce, and there certainly isn't any pr
Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:2)
I'll take that wager too.
Unfortunately I know of more then a few households with multiple computers that were no better off then houses with single computers. In some cases it was worst because they were useing WiFi without so much as wep enabled. In most cases the computer salesmen had sold them on the idea that "They didn't have to worry because of the firewall." As a result I was there to remove the spam bots
Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6 (Score:3, Insightful)
Again, NAT does not enhance security. It just doesn't. I don't understand why people think it does. The thing that enhances security is your firewall. So instead of pretending like you get security because connections aren't mapped in, you ship home routers with a rule that says no connections may be established from the ``outside'' to the ``insi
what are they doing with Class A's? (Score:3, Funny)
I'll just wait.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'll just wait.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'll just wait.... (Score:2, Funny)
Not a bad start...but a couple of things on IPv6.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The article suggests that DHCP will no longer be necessary. This is not necessarily true. IPv6 autoconfiguration will get you an address to get onto the net at large, but it will not give you your DNS servers, time servers, or any number of goodies that DHCP is capable of serving up. Autoconfiguration does remove the neeed to define all kinds of crazy scopes, but it doesn't help with other configurable options.
There is exists a problem with multihoming small entities that need provider diversity in IPv6. Some companies are assigning each customer their own NLA, or
Re:Not a bad start...but a couple of things on IPv (Score:5, Funny)
You seem to understand the technical issues very well... Sorry, but since this is
Re:Not a bad start...but a couple of things on IPv (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not a bad start...but a couple of things on IPv (Score:3, Interesting)
Almost. I got a /64 from Hurricane Electric [he.net] into my FreeBSD firewall/router. The problem is that I have three distinct subnets from that router:
Autoconfig seems to require a /64 or larger netblock, but each of those segments necessarily has to be smaller than the /64 I was given. Even if I only used two bits to identify each local subnet, the resulting /66s would be too small for autoconfig to wor
idiot (Score:5, Funny)
Idiots...
(just kidding, boss)
AC
Re:idiot (Score:2)
I strongly agree. However, since politics have not been removed from the situation, IPv6 will still have the same issues. There will still be address hoarding. I don't see how IPv6 prevents that.
Switches? (Score:5, Informative)
oh forget it... just give me a few million addresses
Poor planning (Score:5, Insightful)
Was it poor planning? The article states that there was an unexpected explosive expansion of the Internet. I believe it's like the Y2K problem, they didn't think their programs would still be in use around 2000, so they only needed to store a two digit year. The same happened here, they didn't realize the Internet would become the World Wide Web, the New Economy, etc. Hell, even Bill Gates didn't see it coming.
Re:Poor planning - Bill Gates (Score:3, Funny)
Of course he didn't. He always said, "640K IP addresses should be enough for anyone."
Re:Poor planning? BS. Poor Math? Certainly! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Poor planning (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Poor planning (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Poor planning (Score:5, Insightful)
Therefore, there are only as many port 80's out there as IP addresses, and NAT cannot change that. IPv6 can.
To me, NAT is just a hack. Having a handful of real IPs is to me much preferable than one IP, NAT, internal IPs, and a massively complex forwarding ruleset.
Therefore, yay IPv6.
Re:Poor planning (Score:2)
Re:Poor planning (Score:3, Insightful)
The key to it all is the "extension header" support that is part of IPv6. You would use multiple headers, in a IP packet. The outermost one referring to the IP of the NAT. The NAT then strips the first header out and forwards the remainder of the packet onwards. For outbound packets, the opposite happens... it adds an extension header indicating the IP address of the NAT.
Home (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Home (Score:2)
anyway from tfa: " Another positive outcome of IPv6 will be better internet routing using QoS, Quality of Service, which routes packets based on priority. So for example, if one person is pinging a server and another is downloading a file, the one pinging will have less priority in their data transmission than the one downloading a file because the user who is downloading a file from has created a data stream which will automatically gain more priority over the simple ICMP
Re:Home (Score:2)
Out of curiosity, why do you think this is a bad idea? It is impossible to layer QoS on top of something which treats all packets equally, and there are legitimate uses for QoS, like VoIP and video conferencing. Furthermore, when the bandwidth is saturated it is better for somethings to work and some not then to have everything jammed up.
Re:Home (Score:2)
Fortunately, the explosion in home networks, peer to peer, WiFi laptops and smartphones (particularly 3G) will be enough to make IPv6 happen, sooner or later.
Re:Home (Score:2)
Re:Home (Score:4, Informative)
Typo? (Score:4, Funny)
Either way it's hilarious.
Re:Typo? (Score:2)
Boss: I just had to cut your budget by 28% to finance the new company jet. By the way, can you deploy all of our servers on IPv6 and have them penetration tested by next Tuesday?
Me: *whack*
Boss: Hey, that smarts!
I for one... (Score:3, Funny)
Here's hoping. (Score:4, Funny)
Please, oh please, let that be a joke...
Re:Here's hoping. (Score:2)
Understatement of the week? (Score:2)
Nats will also no longer need to be used as there will no longer be a need for IP address conservation since there will now be enough IPv6 addresses available for each person on the planet to have 10 of their very own.
I might be mistaken, but I thought I'd heard that IPv6 provides more than enough IP addresses to have one for every atom in the universe. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Re:Understatement of the week? (Score:2, Informative)
So, since 2^128 > 10^80, then yes.
Re:Understatement of the week? (Score:2)
I gave up reading the artical at that point. The author has obviously no idea what he is talking about.
Re:Understatement of the week? (Score:2)
Now, 12 grams of Carbon-12 is one mole, or 6.02e23 atoms. 3.40e38 moles of Carbon-12 is 6.78e12 kilograms.
Now the mass of the earth is 5.97e24 kg, so it's not nearly enough to give every atom in the earth even, but it is quite a lot.
Note - it's been too long since my last Chem or math class, so my numbers may be off. If they are, you can go ahead
IPv6 by 2008? Who's he kidding? (Score:5, Interesting)
When are corporations going to start moving to IPv6? Who knows...that will depend on individual needs, but in general, large corporations aren't going to see a big need to move towards IPv6 any time soon. Without end user by in, who is going to 'force' people to use IPv6?
Yes, IPv4 space is running out. It has been for a long time. That's why Network Address Translation [faqs.org] and private address space [faqs.org] are so common in today's world. They may be hacks, but they do the trick. Where's the business case involved in reorganizing major networks?
Re:IPv6 by 2008? Who's he kidding? (Score:4, Informative)
Boy, are you wrong.
WRONG.
(Just that sentence, of course. The rest of your post is right.)
Wrongity-wrong-wrong-wrong.
Artificial scarcity (Score:3, Interesting)
The current network providers have little incentive to move to IPv6 because they make money through the artificial scarcity of IP addresses. They like the current situation because they have an advantage - new ISPs have trouble entering the market due to the lack of large contiguous IP blocks. When we start falling behind the rest of the world (since countries without enough IPs to go around have no reason to stick with IPv4), maybe they'll start switching to IPv6.
NAT is a solution, and it may be useful
Short Sighted? (Score:3, Interesting)
Phone (Voip)
Cell
Computer (could be many)
TV (could potentially need IP)
Webcams
then we have the possible use that people keep proclaiming will happen
Fridges, and other appliances. This list could continue to grow and I could potentially see 100 being the closer value for many folks in many years. This being said of course not every person in the world is going to need lost of IP addy's since many people dont even need to use one now.
But just think how fast the growth of Ip-Address need has grown in the past 30 years and use that to predict the growth for the next 30. As soon as there are available addresses people will use them. The only reason they aren't being used as liberally now is because they are not available.
We might look back in 10 years and think how short sighted IPv6 was and why another 2 byes weren't just added to the protocol to make its growth laster for many, many,.... years.
Re:Short Sighted? (Score:5, Informative)
The population of the earth is ~6 billion (US billion). So 56,713,727,820,156,410,577,229,101,238 each
Re:Short Sighted? (Score:2)
Re:Short Sighted? (Score:2)
I don't remember the exact numbers, but I read in several places of an estimate of some thousands of IPs per square inch of the planet. It may not be accurate, but 10 per person is way on the low side.
Re:Short Sighted? (Score:3, Funny)
It will be for your phone/computer/webcam/digital camera/mp3player/microwave/fridge/sex toy/stun gun/car/shower/beer/goatse combo device.
Re:Short Sighted? (Score:3, Informative)
(2^128) addresses / (7.9*10^17) square inches on earth = 4.3*10^20 addresses/in^2... That's a lot.
But then again, they probably thought it was a lot to begin with
-Jesse
Re:Short Sighted? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Short Sighted? (Score:2)
-sirket
Re:Short Sighted? (Score:2)
Of course, that's assuming the overhead takes you down to about 0.000000000000000001% efficiency, give or take... which, given that it is being heavily pushed by government bodies, isn't entirely out of the question, but I digress.
Signifigance? (Score:2)
Oh Jeez (Score:2)
Re:Oh Jeez (Score:2)
Re:Oh Jeez (Score:2)
-Jesse
Very hard to read. (Score:4, Insightful)
Note to web page designers:
Dark characters, light background, sans serif fonts. Trust me. People way smarter than you and mr have already figured this out.
Interesting math (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, and I almost skipped the obligatory bashing - his first reference at the bottom of the article is Understanding IPv6 by Microsoft Press.
Guys got an error or two... (Score:5, Informative)
Given that there are 128 bits for IPs in IPv6 this translates into 3.4*10^38 IP addresses. I think this comes out to roughly 5.6*10^28 IP addresses per person.
Only "10" IP addresses per person? (Score:5, Insightful)
(2^64)/10000000000 = 1844674407.37 (approximately)
And that's assuming ten billion total world population. It's not just ten addresses; everyone can network his/her own cold-fusion-powered TOASTER to the Internet and we wouldn't run out of IP's anytime soon.
Re:Only "10" IP addresses per person? (Score:2)
Re:Only "10" IP addresses per person? (Score:2)
The implication is that, even if we were to use quantum computers to store states, there are problems out there whose scope will outclass even our very method for attempting to find a solution.
"P=NP?", by the way, is one of the seven millenium problems, along with the Poincare Conjecture most recently mak
you losers are still talking IPV6 ? get with it! (Score:3, Funny)
get with the program!
augh!
Whatever happened to IPv5? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now if we can just find out what happend to Netscape v5 [imswebtips.com].
IPv6 Multi-homing (Score:5, Interesting)
FrontPage (Score:2, Funny)
I am missing some detail (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I am missing some detail (Score:2)
That information is very easily calculated with a quick google search and google calculation.
-Jesse
Doomsday... (Score:2, Insightful)
I have a feeling this is going to be about as successful as getting the United States to convert to metric.
"She'll do 20 hectares on one tank of kerosene!"
I just read Slashdot for the articles! (Score:3, Funny)
Does that mean that everyone will pretend to read the article, but no one actually will? Come to think of it, maybe Slashdot should change its name to Playboy.
Cheers,
IT
Reserve Addresses? (Score:5, Funny)
I want dead:beef:dead:beef:dead:beef:dead:beef
I had it all caps but the lame-ass lameness filter yelled at me
Re:Reserve Addresses? (Score:2)
Me, I want dead:beef:feed:face:dead:beef:feed:face.
Re:serve Addresses? (Score:2, Funny)
I want FEED:FACE:FEED:FACE:FEED:FACE:FEED:FACE
I have it all caps so the lame-ass lameness filter ignored me
Distro-specific introduction (Score:4, Insightful)
For Fedora Core users stuck without a direct IPv6 connection (read: most of the world), I wrote a quick IPv6 6to4 setup guide [linux.yyz.us].
6to4 is "automatical tunnelling", which in layman's terms means you don't have to bother your ISP or a tunnel broker in order to set up IPv6 on your network. Most OS's these days (not only Linux but *BSD and Windows) fully support basic IPv6, including 6to4.
Article is from Microsoft Press (Score:2)
So very wrong, it's not funny (Score:4, Insightful)
What? There is nothing in IPv6 about this. You can do this right now, today, with IPv4 by having a flexible queueing methodology and flexible packet pattern matching systems. Violla. Any packet destined to network 1.2.0.0/16 that is TCP and port 80 no gets dumped in the high priority queue.
QoS is also the perfect snake oil. In a practical sense, QoS only "kicks in" when there's contention, when there's more data that needs to squeeze in to the pipe than can fit. QoS makes the choice of which packet gets to go over all the other packets waiting to go.
In other words, the only time QoS is of any good is when you are on a over subscribed, saturated network, where there isn't enough bandwidth available to meet demand. In simple terms, the network is broken, and QoS just helps pick who gets screwed the least.
Lastly, routing will be simplified because the IPv6 information header on each packet is far more flexible and can contain more detailed information than an IPv4 header thus allowing for faster routing of data across a network or the internet. Currently, most routers need to maintain as many as 48,000 different routes in their routing tables just to effectively route data that passes through them. IPv6 reduces this number by at least 75%.
This, too, is just flat out wrong. The only way this works is if you have a "clean slate" and parcel out IP addresses in a country/provider hierarchal fashion. Want to move providers? You get new IP's, out of their block. Want to multi home? Well, that kinda blows the efficiency right out of the water because now your network is no longer contained within the providers supernet, you have to announce your individual network both via your provider and where ever else you're peered. Therefore, you just added networks to the global routing tables.
Now, quick show of hands... how many of you want to run your systems off a single homed, single provider only network? And please, none of this god awful "let the router pick which source IP to use!" crap.
Also, if you're worried about IPv6 requiring you to change all of your software, learn new protocols, new methods of connecting, new ways of sending and receiving data or anything like that, fear not. The only thing really changing with IPv6 over what was in IPv4 is that you now have a larger address space which allows for more network addressable IP addresses, a more flexible header and packet system, and faster routing.
Yea, you don't have to change a thing. Not any of your software, or nothin'. Of course, you do need a whole new IP stack to talk IPv6, but that's pretty minor right? Windows folks can make this change by simply cracking open their registries and changing the IP Version key from 4 to 6. Ta da!
Faster routing? How's that? Does it make sense to anyone that looking up a 128 bit address is going to be faster than looking up a 32 bit address? There's more to look up.
Furthermore, all routers worth their salt use hardware accelerated forwarding engines these days. Modern BiCAM's or (nearly always) TCAM's can do single cycle lookup of an address out of a potential 512K entries. It doesn't matter how many entries there are, it can always do find the correct match in a single cycle. And 512K entries is a bit more than a default free routing table (~140K entries) that's common today, so there's no worries there.
The catch is, most of these hardware lookup engines are hard wired for IPv4, and can't easily be extended to IPv6, which means the packets become exception packets and need to be dealt with by the CPU. The CPU lookups are orders of magnitude slower than the hardware lookups. This means that performance for IPv6 goes right through the floor for most routers. Newer routers/blades are starting to come with IPv6 hardware accelerated, but there's an awful lot of infrastructure out there that has no IPv6 hardware acceleration.
Therefore, for most people, IPv6 will initially result in a signfigicant performance drop in terms of packets per second over IPv4.
what's all the hubbub, bub? (Score:2)
Re:what's all the hubbub, bub? (Score:4, Insightful)
Little extra wrinkle (Score:3, Interesting)
There is one small thing that the the article leaves out; where the 64-bit "Interface ID" that is the second half of the address will come from. It isn't going to be some essentially random number assigned to that computer as it is for IPv4 (e.g *.001, *.027, *.145). The first 64 bits of the IPv6 address is routing information to get you to the right subnet, like the first 24 bits in IPv4 (e.g. 145.67.56.*). But unlike IPv4, that has only 8 bits left to identify the particular machine on the subnet, IPv6 has 64 bits available.
This vastly larger space doesn't just allow for larger subnets, it is so big that it allows the values to unique, not just on the subnet but globally. So how are these unique values to be chosen? From the unique IDs embedded in the NIC hardware of course (i.e. your ethernet cards MAC address or the EUI-64 standard that will eventually replace it). So the two halves of the IPv6 address will contain routing information (where you are) and a unique ID (irespective of where you are).
As wireless becomes more unbiquitous in the future, using IPv4 addresses to track people will get more difficult. IPv6 provides the solution. As someone connects with a wireless device at different locations only the first 64 bits of routing information will change, the second 64 bits, the unique ID will stay the same. Who you are (or at least what NIC you are using) and where you are is plastered one every IPv6 packet you send.
Re:I hate to ask a stupid question, (Score:2)
All your networking stuff probably supports it already.
Linux, BSDs, Windows, and Cisco do, to name but a few. And you can always get a block of addresses to play with via a tunnel broker.
Re:I hate to ask a stupid question, (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:IPv6 is like moving cheese (Score:2)
Re:IPv6 will never happen (Score:2)
You mean like the DoD mandating that all its networks be moved over to IPv6 by 2008?
Re:IPv6 will never happen (Score:2)
Re:IPv6 will never happen (Score:3, Informative)
I've played with ipv6 in the past, but after so many years it's still a very long way from useful. Since nobody has ipv6 machines and you need ISP support (which ISPs don't provide) putting up an ipv6 website is a sure-fire way to get zero hits.
It doesn't help that proxies eg. squid don't support it yet.. the project to do it (http://devel.squid-cache.org/ipv6) has been dead sin
Re:IPv6 will never happen (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually 6to4 Just Works(tm) in most cases. You can't get much easier than that. That is the purpose of 6to4: the special anycast prefix guarantees that you do not need special configuration or special ISP support.
Re:Geez, ipv(ision)6ness (Score:2)
Re:Remembering IP Addresses (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? They block incoming connections to a computer, which is a great security enhancement. A NAT box will prevent you from accidentally sharing your hard drive with the world, unless you explicitly allow it. An unpatched Windows machine lasts 16 minutes or so before being compromised - unless it is behind a NAT box. You will also be protected from all worms that depend on incoming connections to propagate, as well as Messenger spam.
So - please explain to me what is so insecure about NAT.